updated 05:10 pm EST, Tue December 29, 2009

PQI's Cool Drive U366 hits 97MB per second

PQI chose to be one of the pioneers of USB 3.0 on Tuesday and added a new entry to its Cool Drive thumb drives. The U366 takes advantage of the 3.0 spec's 5Gbps peak bandwidth to perform at speeds well above those possible with USB 2.0. With peak read speeds of 97MB per second, the storage stick has performance closer to desktop hard drives while consuming the same space as a regular removable USB drive.

The company doesn't provide write speeds, ship dates or pricing for the drives but does expect to ship them worldwide in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities. Getting the full speed of the drive depends on also having a computer with USB 3.0 ports, though the spec will allow the drives to work in USB 2.0 ports at the earlier standard's maximum speeds.